PROFESSOR FORLI was silent until he and Frank had passed out through the gate of the castle, then he took a long breath. “The air of freedom,” he said, “is no different from that I have breathed daily on the walls there, for well-nigh three years, and yet it seems different. It is a comfort that my prison lay in this fair spot, and not in some place where I could see but little beyond the walls. Often and often have I thanked God that it was so, and that, even as a free man and with the world before me, I could see no more lovely scene than this. There was change, too: there was the passage of the ships; I used to wonder where each was sailing; and about the passengers, and how hopefully many of these were going abroad to strange countries in search of fortunes, and how few were returning with their hopes fully satisfied. I smiled sometimes to think of the struggle for wealth and advancement going on in the world round me, while I had no need to think of the future; but my needs, always, as you know, few and simple, were ministered to; and though cut off from converse with all around me, I had the best company in the world in my cell. How thankful I was that my memory was so good—that I could discourse with the great men of the world, could talk with Plato and argue with Demosthenes; could discuss old age with Cicero, or travel with either Homer or Virgil; visit the Inferno with Dante, or the Heavens with Milton; knew by heart many of the masterpieces of Shakespeare and Goethe, and could laugh over the fun of Terence and Plutarch: it was a grand company.”
So the professor continued to talk until they reached the shore. Frank was not called upon to speak. The professor was talking to himself rather than to him, continuing the habit of which the officer of the prison had spoken. As yet his brain was working in its old groove. Once on the strand, he stood silently gazing for two or three minutes, then he passed his hand across his forehead, and with an evident effort broke the chain of his thoughts and turned to Frank.
“Strange talk, no doubt you are thinking, Frank, for a man so suddenly and unexpectedly released from a living grave; but you see, lad, that the body can be emancipated more quickly than the mind from its bonds, and I am as one awaking from a deep sleep and still wondering whether it is I myself, and how I came to be here, and what has happened to me. I fear that it will be some time before I can quite shake off my dreams. Now, lad, once more tell me about my wife and your mother. But no, you have told me that they are well. You have said naught of your father, save that he is not here. Where is he? and how is he?”
“I can answer neither question, grandfather. He, like you, has been lost to us; he disappeared a few months after you did, and we were led to believe that he was killed.”
The professor was himself again in an instant. The mood that had dominated him was shaken off, and he was keen, sharp, and alert again, as Frank remembered him.
“He is lost?” he repeated: “you heard that he was killed? How was it? tell me everything. In the early days of my imprisonment, when I thought of many things outside the walls of my gaol, one thing troubled me more than others. My wife had her daughter; no harm would come to her, save the first grief at my loss and the slow process of hope dying out. My daughter had everything that a woman could wish to make her happy; but your father, I knew him so well, he would not rest when the days passed and no news of me came—he would move heaven and earth to find me; and a man in this country who dares to enquire after a political prisoner incurs no small danger. Is it so that he was missing? Tell me all, and spare no detail; we have the rest of the day before us. We will sit down on this seat. Now begin.”
Frank told, at length, how, on the news of the professor’s disappearance, his father had interested the English government in the matter, and how to all enquiries made the government of Naples had replied that they knew nothing whatever concerning his disappearance; and how, at last, he himself started with an order obtained from Naples for him to search all the prisons of southern Italy.
“It was just like him; it was noble and chivalrous,” the professor said; “but he should have known better. An Englishman unacquainted with Italy might have believed that with such an order he might safely search for one who he suspected was lying in a Neapolitan prison, but your father should have known better. Notice would assuredly be sent before he arrived; and had he come here, for example, I should a week before have been carried away up into the mountains, till he had gone. He would have been shown the register of prisoners, he would not have found my name among them, he would have been told that no such person as he described had ever been confined here,—it was hopeless. But go on with your story.”
Frank told how his father had visited several prisons, and how he wrote letters, exposing their horrors, that had appeared in the English papers, and had created an immense impression throughout the country.
“It was mad of him,” the professor murmured; “noble, but mad.”
Then Frank told how the news came of his being carried off by brigands, of the steps that had been taken, of the evidence of the courier who saw him fall, and of some of his effects being found in the hut on the mountain when this was captured and the brigand chief killed, of the report given by one of the prisoners that his father had died and been buried shortly after he was taken there, and of the vain search that had been made for his body.
“And was this tale believed?” Signor Forli exclaimed, leaping to his feet. “No Italian would for a moment have thought it true—at least, none who had the misfortune to be born under the Neapolitan rule. Surely my wife never believed it?”
“In her heart I know now that she did not,” Frank said, “but she kept her doubts to herself for the sake of my mother. She thought that it was far better that she should believe that father was dead than that she should believe him buried in one of the foul prisons he had described.”
“She was right—she was right,” the professor said: “it was certainly better. And your mother—did she lose hope?”
“She told me that she would not allow herself to believe that he might still be alive, and I believe that she and the signora never said one word on the subject to each other until just before I started.” He then related how the courier had been brought over, how he had been installed in the house in Cadogan Place, and how no suspicion of his being a spy had been entertained until after the receipt of Garibaldi’s letter, and how they were convinced at last that he had overheard all the arrangements made for his leaving for Italy.
“And you are alive, Frank, to tell me this! By what miracle did you escape from the net that was thrown around you?”
This part of the story was also told.
“It was well arranged and bravely carried through, Frank. So you took up the mission which had cost your father either his life or his liberty? It was a great undertaking for a lad, and I wonder indeed that your mother, after the losses she had suffered, permitted you to enter upon it. Well, contrary to all human anticipations, you have succeeded in one half of it, and you will, I trust, succeed in the other. What seemed hardly possible—that you should enter the castle of Reggio as one of its conquerors, and so have free access to the secrets of its prison—has been accomplished; and if Garibaldi succeeds in carrying his arms farther, and other prison doors are opened, we may yet find your father. What you have told me has explained what has hitherto been a puzzle to me: why I should have been treated as a special prisoner, and kept in solitary confinement. Now I understand it. England had taken the matter up; and as the government of Naples had denied all knowledge of me, it was necessary that neither any prisoner, who, perhaps, some day might be liberated, nor any prison official should know me, and be able to report my existence to the British representative. You may be sure that, had your father come here, and examined every prisoner and official, privately, he would have obtained no intelligence of me. Giuseppe Borani would not have been here, he would have been removed, and none would dream that he was the prisoner for whom search was made. And now tell me briefly about this expedition of Garibaldi. Is all Europe at war, that he has managed to bring an army here?”
“First of all, grandfather, I must tell you what happened last year.”
He then related the incidents of the war of 1859, whereby France and Sardinia united and wrested Milan and Lombardy from the Austrians; the brilliant achievements of the Garibaldians; the disappointment felt by Italy at Nice and a part of Savoy being handed over to Napoleon as the price of the services that he had rendered; how Bologna and Florence, Palma, Ferrara, Forli, and Ravenna, had all expelled their rulers and united themselves with Sardinia; and how, Garibaldi having been badly treated and his volunteers disbanded, he himself had retired disappointed and hurt to Caprera.
Then he related briefly the secret gathering of the expedition; the obstacles thrown in its way; its successful landing in Sicily, and the events that had terminated with the expulsion of the Neapolitan forces from the island.
“Garibaldi began with but a thousand men,” he said in conclusion. “He is now at the head of twenty thousand, and it will grow every hour; for we have news of risings throughout southern Calabria. If a thousand sufficed for the conquest of Sicily, twenty thousand will surely be sufficient for that of the mainland. The easy capture of this place will strike terror into the enemy, and raise the enthusiasm of the troops and the Calabrians to the utmost. Garibaldi has but four thousand men with him now; but by this time to-morrow ten thousand at least will have crossed, and I think it is possible that we shall reach Naples without having to fight another battle. At any rate, one pitched battle should be enough to free all Southern Italy. The Papal States will come next, and then, as Garibaldi hopes, Venice; though this will be a far more serious affair, for the Austrians are very different foes from the Neapolitans, and have the advantage of tremendously strong fortifications, which could only be taken by siege operations with heavy artillery, and certainly could not be accomplished by troops like Garibaldi’s.
“Now about my father. Supposing him to be alive, where do you think he would most probably be imprisoned?”
“There is no saying. That he is alive, I feel confident—unless, indeed, he died in prison from the effect of the wound given him when he was captured. That he did not die when in the hands of the brigands, we may take to be certain, for his grave must in that case have been discovered. He must have been handed over to a party of police sent to fetch him by previous agreement with the brigands, and would have been confined in some place considered especially secure from search. I should fancy that he is probably in Naples itself,—there are several large prisons there. Then there would be the advantage that, if the British government had insisted upon a commission of their own officers searching these prisons, he could be removed secretly from one to another, so that before the one in which he was confined could be examined, he would have been taken to another, which had been previously searched.
“His case was a more serious one than mine. Although I was a naturalised British subject, I had gone of my own free will to Italy, in the vain belief that I should be unmolested after so long an absence; and probably there would have been no stir in the matter had not your father taken it up so hotly, and by the influence he possessed obtained permission to search the dungeons. But, as I said, his case was a far more serious one. He went out backed by the influence of the British government; he was assisted by the British legation; he held the order of the Neapolitan government for admission to all prisons. Thus, had it been found that he had, in spite of their own so-called safe-conduct, been seized and imprisoned, the British fleet would have been in the Bay of Naples in a very short time—especially as his letters, as you tell me, created so much feeling throughout the country. Therefore it would be an almost vital question for the government to maintain the story they had framed, and to conceal the fact that, all the time they were asserting that he had been captured and killed by the brigands, he was in one of their own prisons.
“I may say frankly that they would unhesitatingly have had him killed, perhaps starved to death in a cell, were it not that they would have put it in the power of some official or other to betray them: a discovery that would have meant the fall of the government, possibly the dethronement of the king. Had he been an Italian, he would assuredly have been murdered, for it would not have paid any prison official to betray them; whereas, being an Englishman of distinction, in whose fate the British government had actively interested itself, any man who knew the facts could have obtained a reward of a very large amount indeed for giving information. That is the sole reason, Frank, that leads me to believe that he may still be alive. He was doubtless imprisoned under another name, just as I was; but at least it would be known to the men that attended upon him that he was an Englishman, and these could scarcely have avoided suspecting that he was the man about whom such a stir had taken place. The government had already incurred a tremendous risk by his seizure; but this would have been far greater had foul means been used to get rid of him in prison.
“In the former case, should by any extraordinary chance his existence have become known to the British legation, they would have framed some deliberate lie to account for their ignorance of his being Captain Percival. They might, for instance, assert that he had been taken prisoner in the mountains, with a party of brigands; that his assertions that he was an Englishman had been wholly disbelieved, for he would naturally have spoken in Italian, and his Italian was so good that any assertions he made that he was an Englishman would have been wholly discredited. That is merely a rough guess at the story they might have invented, for probably it would have been much more plausible; but, however plausible, it would not have received the slightest credit had it been found that he had been foully done to death.
“It is difficult, Frank, when one is discussing the probable actions of men without heart, honour, or principle, and in deadly fear of discovery, to determine what course they would be likely to take in any particular circumstances. Now, the first thing that I have to do is to cross to Messina, and to telegraph and afterwards to write to my wife. Can I telegraph?”
“Yes, but not direct: the regular line is that which crosses the straits to this town and then goes up through Italy. That, of course, we have not been able to use, and could not use it now. All messages have been sent by the line from Cape Passaro to Malta, and thence through Sardinia and Corsica to Spezzia. You can send a message by that. There will be no difficulty in getting a boat across the straits. You see the war-ships have steamed away. As soon as the castle was taken they found that their anchorage was within range of its guns. They fired a few shots into the town when the castle was bombarding it, and then retired. I believe that all through the men of the navy have been very reluctant to act against us, except, of course, at Palermo.”
“Then I will go at once. It is strange to me to be able to say I will go.”
“Very well, grandfather. Of course you have no money, but I can supply you with as much as you like. I have plenty of funds. I can’t say where you will find me when you come back, but you will only have to enquire where Garibaldi himself is: I am sure to be with him.”
“I shall stay a couple of days there. After that hard pallet and prison fare I cannot resist the temptation of a comfortable bed, a well-furnished room, and a ci............